Lexington

Katherine Harris’s impossible job

THIS has been a fortnight from hell for Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, who sits at the heart of the election turmoil which is tearing apart her state. On Tuesday evening the Florida Supreme Court subjected her to a rebuke of stinging severity. “To allow the secretary to summarily disenfranchise innocent electors in an effort to punish dilatory [election] board members, as she proposes in the present case,” the justices thundered unanimously, “misses the constitutional mark. The constitution eschews punishment by proxy.”

This slap across the face by Florida's highest court came after days of relentless assaults from Democrats. One of Al Gore's hatchet-men has likened Mrs Harris to a “Soviet commissar”; another has dubbed her “Cruella DeVil”. Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School's answer to Jerry Springer, states flatly that she is a “crook”. Mrs Harris's life has hardly been made easier by the fact that her extraordinarily vivid taste in make-up has become the subject not just of comedy sketches but of earnest advice columns in heavyweight newspapers. (The gist of the advice: don't use a trowel.)

The thing that has provoked all this Democratic vitriol, of course, is Mrs Harris's constitutional position as the official arbiter of Florida's elections—and hence, in this case, the future of the country. The Democrats are convinced that a committed Republican is too partisan to do the job properly. Mrs Harris was co-chairman of George W. Bush's campaign in Florida. She works just down the hall from his brother, Florida's governor. She has talked of wanting a job in the Bush administration. Shortly before the election she enlisted a well-known Republican, General Norman Schwarzkopf, to make a supposedly impartial television announcement urging Floridians to go to the polls.

Democrats have not limited themselves to arguing that Mrs Harris is a partisan. They also argue that she is a lightweight who simply does the Bush family's bidding and, at the same time, that she is a corrupt politician who is willing to do anything to win. They point delightedly to the fact that she once played a Vanna White-like character in a Sarasota musical revue, leading the audience in a chicken dance. (A video of the chicken dance has apparently been sold to People magazine.) She has been lambasted in Florida newspapers for spending more than $100,000 on travel in her first 22 months in office, more than any other elected official.

So is Mrs Harris really a partisan whose savaging by Mr Gore's in-house rottweilers and flaying by the Supreme Court is justified punishment? Or is she a respectable politician who has been put in an impossible situation? The answer, as usual, is a bit of both. But it is hard not to feel sympathetic. In terms of the soap operas that her appearance so evocatively recalls, she seems to be more the hapless Sue Ellen Ewing than the scheming Alexis Carrington.

Mrs Harris is certainly guilty of partisanship. Her reading of the law had a way of coinciding with Mr Bush's interests. But equally the Democrat-heavy Supreme Court's reading of the Florida law has a way of coinciding with Mr Gore's interests, as his camp's ecstatic reception of the verdict on Tuesday demonstrates. Mrs Harris had the decency to telegraph her intentions to the country before her ruling on November 14th, rather than springing them on an unsuspecting people. And she was far from relentlessly partisan: she insisted, for example, that election officials should accept military ballots only if they were properly postmarked, an instruction that has caused huge grief to Republicans.

So far—by the admittedly oozy standards of Florida—attempts to dig up the dirt on her have not produced much genuine muck. In 1994, she was suspected of taking illegal contributions in a campaign-finance scandal centred on a dodgy insurance company. But then so were half the politicians in the state—and she was never charged with breaking the law. She has ratcheted up her department's travel budget, but that is largely the inevitable consequence of her hitherto popular decision to focus on foreign trade.

Mrs Harris is very far from being a Bush poodle. She wrested the secretaryship of state from one of Jeb Bush's closest political allies, Sandra Mortham, in a strikingly brutal election. Far from being a member of Jeb's inner cabinet, she has voted against him on some sensitive subjects; and, as by far the richest member of his cabinet, she is least awed by his family connections. She is the granddaughter of Ben Hill Griffin, a citrus and cattle baron who was worth well over $300m when he died in 1990. Her grandfather's name adorns the University of Florida's football stadium, which is “about as big a deal as you can get in Florida”, says Lance de Haven-Smith, a political scientist at Florida State.

If Florida had produced a clear victory for either candidate, Mrs Harris's political future would probably have been secure. A Bush victory might well have led to a decent position in his administration. If Mr Gore had won, she might have run for the Senate in 2002. But now she is skewered. Mr Bush cannot appoint her to anything without provoking fury. As for the Senate, Mrs Harris is now too divisive a figure to win in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 400,000; and she will also have to face questions about whether all those trade trips drew resources from her job of overseeing elections.

At best she might end up as another Republican martyr—a more sympathetic, shoulder-padded version of Kenneth Starr. In fact, the real fault lies not with Mrs Harris but with the American habit of putting partisans in charge of overseeing elections. No system could possibly be devised that is better calculated to produce bitter wrangling during a close election and festering wounds afterwards. Does anyone really doubt that the Republicans would be just as rabid in attacking a Democratic secretary of state if they were in similar circumstances? Until this election, the rather mundane civil servants who tend to serve as returning officers in most big democracies seemed dowdy by comparison—Coronation Street to her South Fork. But, God knows, America—and probably even Mrs Harris herself—must wish that a neutral bureaucrat held her job now.